Whispers

I’ll be tabling at the Louisiana Zine Fest (I'm not yet listed but I'm confirmed)! I’ll be there with a Ninefox comic zine and solo journaling / micro-TTRPG zines, including some never before released to the wild! Come say howdy if you’re in the area!

(Yes: physical zines. I have a laser printer and I'm not afraid to use it!)

Date: Friday, August 1, 2025
Time: 12pm – 8pm

Place:
Main Library at Goodwood
7711 Goodwood Blvd
Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70806
USA

(Pro tip: Goodwood Grill across the way has terrific food if you do meat/seafood. I especially love the shrimp po'boys if shrimp is a thing you do.)

In terms of sustainable effort:

MUD: medium-high bar if using existing codebase.

Ink serialized web-based text adventure: medium-low bar. Probably chapter by chapter releases.

ETA #1: Wait a second! You can compile Inform 7 to release for playing on the web! Either this didn't exist ca. 2007 or I suck at reading documentation. That's my choice, then. I enjoy writing parser IF (interactive fiction / text adventures) more than choice-based formats. Yay!

VN: high bar.

comic: I'm doing this for myself so it really doesn't matter what anyone thinks, but maybe people prefer this.

2D animated short (we're talking 5-10 minutes): SLOWEST. VERY SLOW. 2D hand-drawn animation is just slow. But I've proposed this for my final major project starting in 2028, so I'm doing this no matter what anyone else thinks.

[1] serialized reboot/AU novel (prose): This would require negotiating with my publisher, which has an option on further prose works. I control the relevant rights for other formats.

Discussion with Solaris suggested they would be happy to talk about a different Machineries trilogy with a new plot and a new set of characters but the two ideas I have aren't trilogy-length and I don't have a sense that any reader wants this! It's theoretically possible Solaris might let me play with a newsletter (etc) serialization if it's something they wouldn't have an interest in offering for and they are assuming zero risk since I doubt anything I do here would tank sales of the existing books. However, there are negotiation complications here that may make this Not Possible rights-wise so I'm hoping no one wants this and I can stop thinking about it with a clear conscience.

I'm sitting on something like 100,000+ words of disorganized prose bits (not a coherent single narrative, it's a bunch of different POVs) and I want to write about that crashhawk unit and Gödel's incompleteness theorems in hexarchate numerology. I have an outline.

But also. For health and family reasons, I'm not signing a book contract in the near future; any prose-format writing is going to be on spec or similar if at all, and if the answer is that it's just noodling that stays on my hard drive, it is what it is. Meanwhile, I have orchestration homework to do, ta!